Through our Global Working Groups, we offer faculty the opportunity to develop ambitious, collaborative projects that span multiple disciplines. We aim to leverage different forms of expertise across the social sciences, sciences and humanities to address the world’s most challenging problems.
The Buffett Institute helps Northwestern scholars find research partners as they tackle big problems beyond the bounds of a single discipline. We hold lunchtime workshops, make introductions and support projects as they develop. Applications for the new round of Global Working Group funding are due on March 1, 2024. Successful projects will be awarded up to $200K to be spent over the next two years.
Learn more about our Global Working Groups:
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The Antibiotic Resistance Working Group aims to develop basic infrastructure to evaluate antimicrobial resistance (AMR) across two disparate healthcare systems in different parts of the world and understand how healthcare providers make decisions around antibiotic prescribing.
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The AI and Social Movement group aims to develop a robust understanding of how social movements evolve and what impacts they might have in their communities.
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The Climate Crisis + Media Arts group seeks to influence cultural and political discourse on the climate emergency by creating new ways of depicting what it means to live and die within a changing climate.
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The Defusing Disasters group aims to address the complex challenges of community resilience building through the development of a community-centered approach to produce globally applicable but locally informed Hazardous Weather Vulnerability Indices.
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The Disproportionate Impacts of Environmental Challenges group aims to solve some of the world’s most pressing environmental problems, while recognizing the disproportionate effects that environmental challenges and their solutions have on marginalized communities. Click to learn more.
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The Empowering the Next Generation of Global Women Leaders in Universities around the World group aims to help populate the global pipeline of women leaders by developing empirically supported interventions in university-based settings.
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The Epistemic Reparations group aims to create a more holistic and victim-centered framework for understanding reparations to generate recognition of the’ ‘right to be known’ for victims of gross human rights violations.
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The Language Curricula and Gender Equality group aims to investigate how language curricula draw on and perpetuate gender stereotypes and how these curricula can be reassessed to challenge and overcome these stereotypes in order to advance gender equality in language learning and beyond.
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The Making Water Insecurity Visible group aims to address major gaps in the measurement and visibility of the underlying issues driving the global water crisis by using ethnographies, surveys and biosensors to produce new data on water insecurity and issues of water quality.
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The Race, Caste and Colorism Working Group seeks to develop an interdisciplinary project that explores the cultural and social systems of racism, casteism, and colorism worldwide, with a focus on the U.S., South Asia, and the Caribbean/Latin America.
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The Trauma, Music and the Breath aims to gather an interdisciplinary team of clinicians, researchers, musicians, and thought leaders to examine the ways music is being used globally to improve the health and well-being of children throughout and following the traumas of COVID-19.
Learn more about our Global Catalyst Grant Groups:
Global Drug CrisisThe Global Drug Crisis group aims to build an active drug surveillance system and drug policy stringency index that deepens understanding of the global drug crisis, creating a new foundation for effective evaluation and policymaking.
Media AestheticsThe Media Aesthetics group aims to teach young people how to make sense of their sensual perceptions with contextual and self-awareness by developing an aesthetic education curriculum focused on advancing global media literacy in the U.S. and beyond.
Read faculty reflections on their experiences collaborating in a Buffett Global Working Group: